Creation of a Multidisciplinary Curriculum for Hydrologic Literacy: An Applied Ethnography.

Hancock, Elizabeth S.; Uyeda, Steven

Science programs funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) are increasingly involved in science education reform. Such entities are funded for science research and are expected to pursue educational activities with K-12 students and teachers. These efforts are often guided by ideas from current science education reform. The NSF Science and Technology Center for Sustainability of Semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Area (SAHRA) has established an educational goal of hydrologic literacy, modeled on reform for scientific literacy. One of SAHRA's educational programs involves creation of a regionally focused water curriculum. This collaborative effort involves secondary teachers, science and policy experts, and science educators creating multidisciplinary curriculum that integrates the sciences and other academic fields. The purposes of this study were to characterize goals of the project and the individual goals of participants and to use such understanding to facilitate curriculum completion and implementation. As integral research, this study adopted a constructivist perspective to pursue description and interpretation of individual intention and collective socio-cultural phenomena. Research strategies of applied ethnography and grounded theory guided the collection and analysis of interviews with participants, meeting notes, e-mail, curriculum modules, and journals. Findings indicate that participants share a common conception of a innovative multidisciplinary curriculum while holding differing images of the goals of SPLASH in terms of educational reform and practice with conflicting interests in recruitment of qualified students into science, meaningful learning among students, cutting edge content, innovative practice, and professional development. These differences have forced participants to engage in active construction of integrity through the adoption of a modular structure and a commercial curriculum development template. (Author)